Texas Frightmare Weekend 2015: Day One

 

Yes!!! Here we go, horror fiends, with the monster TFW posts! This year was my third time attending Texas Frightmare Weekend and it was just as amazing, wonderful, fantastic as the previous two years. But, this year was maybe a bit bigger and more exciting because Frightmare was celebrating its 10th year in existence, and founder Loyd Cryer really knocked it out of the park with all the amazing guests he lined up.

 

My personal experience was also enhanced a lot more because I not only snagged myself one of the coveted VIP passes, but I was also able to get a room in the host hotel. The previous two years I stayed off-site, so I missed out on the late night parties and other convention shenanigans - but not this year! This year I tried to be there for almost all of it to really get the full TFW experience. Here's some pics of my awesome VIP swag bag.

 

 

Alright, enough of that. Let's get into all the cool shit I got to do.

Friday night I had a photo op and a screening to attend, plus I had to scope out the vendors and make mental notes of what I wanted to buy. I wanted to save all of my more anticipated meet-and-greets for Saturday when things were more exciting, so I just got a few of the "smaller" (for lack of a better term) guests this first night.

First up was director Don Coscarelli. I know he was there for the Phantasm reunion that they were having, but I am sadly not a Phantasm fan! I've only seen the first film. Anyway, Don was an amazing first meet of the convention. I handed him the Bubba Ho-Tep picture I picked out for him to sign, and all I had to say was how much I loved the movie before he starts telling me stories of what Ossie Davis was like on set. We also discussed the odd but awesome tone of the movie. When I told him that Incident On and Off a Mountain Road was my favorite Masters of Horror entry, he said he really appreciated hearing that because he was nervous about being in the company of so many other amazing horror directors for that. No need, Don, your film was amazing! Don was so incredibly nice and he gave every fan in his line a great conversation, and that's the kind of celebrity I always appreciate at cons. Wonderful guy!

 

...and an action shot with the Phantasm ball.

 

 

Speaking earlier of Masters of Horror, my next meet was an actor in my really-close-second favorite entry. I'm sadly not as familiar as I should be with Udo Kier's earlier work, but I have loved seeing him in stuff like Blade and Halloween, etc. One of my favorite horror scenes of all time is in John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns when Udo is feeding his own intestines into the film projector, so I was really hoping that he would have a Cigarette Burns picture at his table. And, lo and behold, not only did he have a picture from that movie, but the picture was of that very scene! Ah, it must be fate. Udo was also a very cool guy. I love his accent.

 

 

I was very undecided this year about what order I wanted to do my meetings because I had SO FREAKING MANY OF THEM to do. So I stopped at my favorite poster vendor - they have the best deal on 11x17 prints at buy 3, get one free - and spent what felt like an eternity trying to pick out the four I wanted. One was a Hellraiser poster, and one was pretty cool because it was a "Stab" poster, in honor of the guests from Scream. The other two are ones that I got signed later, including my next meet and greet with...

 

...Camille Keaton! Very excited and honored to meet this lady, and she was so sweet and conversational. She also liked the sparkly skull earrings that I was wearing, so bonus for me! I told her that she should be so proud of herself, obviously talking about I Spit on Your Grave, and she gave me a wonderful smile and "thank you" for that. I also gave her praise for What Have You Done to Solange? and she gave me a great signature and picture with her!

 

 

 

The two big headliners this year were Neve Campbell and Skeet Ulrich. Neve wasn't allowing pictures at her table because they thought she was going to be too busy, so I got a professional photo op with her and Skeet because he was also going to be wearing the Ghostface costume for the pics and that is just fucking cool. When I walked up to get in position between them, Skeet noticed my Carrie t-shirt and says, "Carrie?!" I'm not sure if that was an exclamation of disapproval or what, but it was still pretty funny. And our picture came out awesome!

 

Time for some food and then the first of two movie screenings I went to this weekend. I was actually strangely excited for Gutterballs 2: Balls Deep, because while the first one was a bit much in some parts, overall I could appreciate the campy craziness of it. Director Ryan Nicholson was there to introduce and talk about the movie, and he told us that we were the first audience to see it and that it was mostly a rough cut (uh oh) and that the last third of the movie wasn't going to make a whole lot of sense (double uh oh) and that it got very nasty and brutal at the end. Oooookay. He was definitely right. The look and feel of the sequel was pretty much the same as it was for Gutterballs in the first part of the film, but yes, there is a point where the movie goes off in crazy direction and then just ends with a lot of sexually brutal stuff. I didn't really hate or love Gutterballs 2 - there were some interesting trippy scenes - so maybe I'll have to see it again when Nicholson is done with it. Gutterballs 3: No Holes Barred (OMG) is apparently coming in 2016.

 

 

Normally this would have been the end of my Friday night, but since I was staying at the hotel this year, I finally got to go to the Friday night party, which they always make some special theme for whoever the guests are that year. This year they had the Phantasm Ball (haha), and because Gutterballs 2 started at the same time as the party, I missed whatever craziness happened at the beginning. I was there for the costume contest, and some guy dressed as the Babadook won. I imbibed a little and danced a little and stayed up way too late even though I knew Saturday was going to be a long ass day. Oh well. It was a lot of fun!

 

 

Oh, but all this isn't even close to the amount of awesome that I would experience this weekend! Saturday was the most amazing day, so definitely stay tuned for that!

 

 

Day Two is now available HERE!

And go HERE for Day Three!

 



Movie Review: Gutterballs (2008)

 

Sophistication met utter crap the other night when my movie-watching Friday was a mash-up of Liam Neeson in A Walk Among the Tombstones, immediately followed by... Gutterballs. I'm not even really sure what made me add Gutterballs to my queue in the first place, and it almost pains me to admit that I didn't regret it. That much.

(By the way, A Walk Among the Tombstones is really good.)

Two rival bowling teams meet at the alley after hours for a little healthy competition. But things turn bad after one game, when hottie Lisa is brutally gang raped by all four members of the opposing team. The next night, the bowling alley becomes a scene of equally brutal slaughter when a masked killer starts picking off all the players one by one.

This is a movie that I don't really know what to do with. As an extremely trashy, annoying, exploitation movie throwback, Gutterballs definitely succeeds, and almost rises beyond what it needs to do in order to live up to that reputation. Filmmaker Ryan Nicholson takes the typical rape/revenge exploitation plot, adds in the requisite over-the-top villains (the rapists, not the killer), peppers in other airhead characters to be fodder for the killer, and tops it all off with some ridiculously gory and equally exploitative kills. In a lot of ways, this setup worked for me. But there were a few things that took me out of the film's cheesy world that made me not completely love it for what it was.

All of the characters here are just gawd awful, as they should be. I didn't even really like any of the good guys, except maybe for Jamie and Lisa. Really, their stupid costuming was enough to make me not like these people. It's not even that the acting was bad - all of these guys were actually great at what they did and the people they were trying to portray. It's just that all these people are people that I wouldn't be able to stand being around. The true scene-stealers in terms of awfulness are of course Steve, AJ, and Joey - our three douchebaggy rapists. The fourth guy, Patrick, is the reluctant abuser which makes him slightly less douchebaggy than his friends. But only slightly. Steve must have seriously high blood pressure as he has a constant 'roid-rage attitude. Everything he says must be YELLED and every sentence he says must contain at least three uses of the word "fuck." But AJ, however, is just the worst. Again, props to the actor for his commitment, but OH MY GOODNESS. That laugh? That face he makes when he laughs? That popped collar??? I could not wait to see what kind of death this guy got.

Speaking of which. The gore in Gutterballs, I have to admit, was kind of amazing. There are truly some inventive and, like I said before, ridiculous kills, many of them bowling pin related. One person gets the worst eye-gouging I've ever seen with the sharpened end of a pin while another one just gets a pin shoved down their throat. Also with throats, there is a nice slashing and a strangling with the strings of a pair of bowling shoes. I can't even describe the first two deaths because they're just icky and you have to see it for yourself. Probably my favorite kill was the one involving the ball waxing machine (a machine for waxing BOWLING balls, just to be clear). Gutterballs also has what I am now calling the best shotgun death ever. One character gets a blast that hits him in the neck which makes his neck kind of explode, leaving his head to flop over to one side. One thing that was kind of pissing me off at first about these deaths was that all the good people were the ones dying, and that they were getting it just as bad, if not worse, than the rapists do later on. Nevertheless, the gore and effects in Gutterballs is actually really impressive and I quite enjoyed it.

The rape scene confused me a little. Sometimes it is actually shot the way it needs to be - from the victim's point of view, showing the harsh reality of the crime and the savagery of the offenders. But then the other half of the time, it is shot in a manner more along the lines of exploitation. There are many shots of Lisa's exposed, perfect breasts, and her long, slender legs on Steve's shoulders when he rapes her. So they somehow managed to sexualize and exploit the scene, and make it sympathetic at the same time. One really atrocious thing they do in this scene is feature these horrible, non-realistic sound effects for I'm assuming comedic purposes - because it's funny to rape a girl with a bowling pin.

Nevertheless, Gutterballs is pretty much exactly what it wanted to be. A completely crazy and kitschy exploitation film with all the sex, nudity, and gore that you could possibly stand from such a film. It's got real boobs, fake penises, buckets of blood, and according to Wikipedia, 625 uses of the word "fuck." Break out the popcorn and indulge in something truly trashy for your next movie night. And be prepared for Gutterballs 2: Balls Deep, which I believe they are currently working on!